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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

shield_of_david - 03:11pm Apr 29, 2002 EST (#1881 of 1892)

REVENGE OF THE EUROTRASH

Ron Rosenbaum points out in this week's New York Observer "the astonishing hypocrisy of European diplomats and politicians . . . supporting the Palestinian 'right of return' when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder."

Maybe the European reaction is not pathological at all. Maybe, rather, it's all too horrifyingly familiar.

Consider Nobel Peace Prize Committee member Hanna Kvanmo, a 76-year-old leftist politician in Norway. She announced that she would very much like to withdraw the 1994 award from Israeli politician Shimon Peres but not from Yasser Arafat.

It subsequently came out that Kvanmo served time in a Norwegian jail for collaborating with the Nazis during World War II (and lest anyone think this story of her life is Zionist propaganda, you can find a, yes, sympathetic treatment of her life story at a neo-Nazi Web site called http://www.newsturmer.com/ ). See: EUROPE LOVES HATE

rshow55 - 03:32pm Apr 29, 2002 EST (#1882 of 1892)

One doesn't have to be an antisemite, and one doesn't have to excuse antisemitism, to regret Jenin.

Friedman calls the settlements "crazy" . . . and he's surely no antisemite.

eraserhead2 - 04:13pm Apr 29, 2002 EST (#1883 of 1892)
REMEMBER THE 11TH OF SEPTEMBER !

rshow55 4/29/02 3:32pm

Friedman calls the settlements "crazy" . . . and he's surely no antisemite.

Friedman is no anti-Semite...but he is the consummate corporate centrist ass-kisser and one of the most overrated opinion-shapers of the day.

If you've ever seen him do his Richard Nixon impersonation you'd know there's something wrong with the guy--Pulitzer Prize or no...

rshow55 - 04:33pm Apr 29, 2002 EST (#1884 of 1892)

I'd be glad for the chance to see Friedman give that impersonation -- though he isn't on the stage.

eraserhead , you and almarst may have your differences, but you've got some common ground about Friedman.

Me, I think he's won his Pulitzer's for good reasons, but has flaws like the rest of us.

If the Middle East situation gets decently solved, though, I think he, and people at the TIMES who have backed him, will deserve a lot of credit -- probably even more than they'll get.

rshow55 - 04:45pm Apr 29, 2002 EST (#1885 of 1892)

Interesting piece.

At Fox News, the Colonel Who Wasn't By JIM RUTENBERG http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/29/business/media/29HOAX.html

I stand in awe of Cafasso -- for some while, a major problem for me has been trying to figure out how, on some basis or other, to get some key things checked - - including some consistency relationships (where I have no proof in the form of records or credentials, and have said so) about my life, and reasons I've had for concern. Not that these personal things really have much to do about the basic things about nuclear safety, and about the fact that "missile defense" is a boondoggle.

Mainly, I've been concerned about getting some key facts about missile defense checked - in ways that are possible, I believe, without violating any security laws at all - by working in the open literature. A major point I've been trying to make is that, when answers really matter, distrust is safer, and checking on what actually matters ought to be obligatory. I've used the term "morally forcing." Checking is far from being morally forcing today -- and checking is least likely, these days, on matters that are most central to our life and death -- military matters, including matters concerning nuclear weapons.

I'd like to repost from shortly after my posting of September 25, 2001 that was recopied as MD1600 rshow55 4/21/02 3:14pm

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